How to Use Video in Your Marketing Plan

Kayla DiPilato

If you saw our blog post last week, you are probably now convinced of the benefits of adding video to your marketing strategy. But, what we did not discuss last week is how you can get started. So, today we rounded-up several tips to help you create your first video.

Get your team onboard

Getting your employees onboard with starting a video campaign is important because you won’t be able to do this alone. If you have a marketing team, they should be the first to buy-in and can take the lead on the project, but the rest of your team should be willing to be featured, give ideas and feedback, and help support the campaign. If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team yet, then it is even more critical that your team wants to jump in and provide support. In order to get them excited, send around information about why using video is a great idea and provide a few examples of other great videos companies have produced.

Understand your audience

This is a critical first step because you want to create content that will speak directly to your audience. Questions to ask yourself include: What types of people are you trying to reach?, What are their interests?, What types of content do they want to see?, and Who are the influencers that are important to this audience?

If you already have a blog this can be a great place to look for answers to these questions. For example, if educational style blog posts are the most popular on your blog you may want to start with an educational style video.

Start with a solid plan

In order to hold yourself accountable, you want to set goals that are measurable and attainable. These can include short term goals, like when you want to put out your first video and longer term goals, like what you hope to gain by producing videos. Track your goals and celebrate when you reach them. When you don’t meet them, reflect on why and what you can do better next time.

Don’t be OVERLY stressed

Starting with video can feel like a big step that paralyzes some as they work to make everything perfect. To be frank, your first video will be your worst and that’s ok! You will improve your skills with each video you make. Rather than focusing too hard on how you can be perfect, dive into the creative process and know that you can learn from your mistakes along the way.

Focus on SEO

To rank highly in search you want to use keywords in your title, but don’t stop there! You will also want to write descriptions for your videos with keywords as well because this is also taken into account for the rankings. However, like with blogging, you should still avoid keyword stuffing and make sure the words you use are relevant.

Create a Youtube channel

For some this may seem obvious, but I have talked to several small business owners who only post their videos on social media because they weren’t sure Youtube would bring in any traffic and did not want to manage yet another social media account. Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world which is why we highly recommend you take full advantage of this platform.

Try ads

Once you have created some great video content you want to make sure that a large audience gets to see it. If you have even a small budget you can run ads on social media to get your video seen. Algorithms make it increasingly difficult for small business posts to be seen and using paid ads is a way to combat this (whether or not we think this is fair is a story for another blog post).

Create partnerships

Partnering with an influencer can be a great way to grow your audience through video. You can choose to either feature an influencer in your video or find an influencer to feature you in one of their own videos. Both can help you expose yourself to a new audience if you have the budget to do this. When choosing an influencer you want to select someone whose audience will likely be interested in your product, this is why step 2 above is so important.

Keep testing

Even if your first video is successful, continue testing to see if there are ways you can make it more successful. Consider changes like a different type of intro, switching up your ad targeting, or creating more keyword rich descriptions. A big part of marketing is gathering information and learning from it, so trying out different tests, even if they aren’t successful, is great because you have more information about your audience moving forward.